Mary Grover at Salon has distilled the essence of using Dragon Dictate into a brief post. I couldn't possibly do better -- or even as well -- so I refer you to it.

I was assured by several people that if I continued to use DragonDictate and use the vocabulary training feature, eventually the software would learn to do a better job. I made sure to diligently train Dragon on everything that I wrote. Unfortunately, it appears that training function itself is broken. I was suspicious that even when I used very unusual words, it always insisted that it already knew all those words. So I tested it by training on a set of made-up words. When Dragon happily announced that it already knew all of those words, too, I wrote an e-mail to technical support.
I wasn't very optimistic about hearing from technical support, since they had not replied to my previous e-mails when I have had other questions. This time, they replied promptly to tell me the technical support had expired, but that I could pay for extended technical support. Presumably, if I were to pay, they would go back to not answering e-mails.
I spend a lot of time at the computer, and I bought Dragon so that I wouldn't have to spend all of that time typing. I pace when I think, but pacing and typing don't mix. I thought Dragon would give me more flexibility. As of yet, this remains a distant dream.

About

The focus of lab and blog is language -- what it is, how we understand it, and what we can do with it. At the blog, we discuss research, findings and controversies. At the lab, we try to create new research, findings and controversies.